User-Friendly Presentation Apps for the Not-So-Creative Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs play an important role in society. They help drive economies. They create jobs. They think of amazingly successful business enterprises that no one has thought of before. They are geniuses and highly creative in their own fields.

Unfortunately, not all entrepreneurs are capable of making effective presentation materials. They have all the ideas but have trouble translating these ideas into a presentation. Many of these entrepreneurs are new in the business and cannot yet afford to hire people to make presentation materials for them. This is where presentation apps come in handy.

Challenges faced by the not-so-creative start-up entrepreneurs

As they start putting together a presentation, not-so-artistically inclined entrepreneurs face these challenges:

Cannot organize their ideas;

Cannot break them down into bite-size pieces and summarize them into a professionally-made presentation material that will send the right message;

Difficulty in prioritizing their thoughts so that only the most important ideas are reflected in the slides;

Difficulty in editing templates to come up with catchy slides, and as a result, their presentations tend to be boring and do not hold the attention of target audience;

Absence of technical knowledge in creating and editing graphics.

Based on these challenges, start-up entrepreneurs will need the help of presentation makers that contain the following features:

Easy to use;

Templates that were created by professional designers;

Templates that guide users on how much text should be placed in a slide;

Offer a wide range of attractive templates;

Extensive library of icons, graphics and infographics.

There are a number of online presentation apps to choose from, that will meet the requirement of a non-techie entrepreneur. Here’s a rundown of these apps:

Before most presentation apps became available for everyone, there was Powerpoint. Many of us learned to do presentations using Powerpoint. Because it has been there for ages, we kind of expect it to have evolved into something more exciting by now, without losing its user-friendly approach. However, to date, Powerpoint templates are still limited and designs are quite conventional.

If there is one presentation maker that combines the features of all the other apps, it has to be Visme. Many presentation apps are good in only one or two areas – like they are ideal for animations, graphics or the usual combination of photo and text presentations. However, Visme lets users combine all of these with ease and the result is an engaging professional-looking presentation. It also has a huge library of templates, vectors, icons and images.

Visme is capable of file sharing and collaboration, great with infographics and capable of tracking e-mail addresses of persons who viewed the presentation material online.

Haiku Deck is capable of creating elegant-looking presentation materials. It is easy to use like Powerpoint, only with a greater stock of templates (around 35) and 35 million stock photos. However, the templates cannot be easily changed (thus not flexible) and the app cannot be used offline.

Presentations do not have to be formal. Sometimes, they need to have a more casual theme to capture the attention of target clients. Powtoon may be used if the material calls for animation. Due to its nature, Powtoon is not recommended for meetings with spontaneous discussions where the audience can ask questions or raise concerns anytime during the presentation.

Keynote is the Powerpoint version of Apple. Easy to use, it has around 30 themes that presenters can choose from. It also has its own library of photos. The downside is that this app can only be used for MAC (iOS systems).

Some presentations demand screenshots. If this is the case, SnagIt is one of the apps for the job. It offers upgraded features that allow users to organize, edit and modify screenshots. But SnagIt works for Windows only.

This app provides users the ease of integrating multimedia materials from different sources (RSS feeds, YouTube, Flickr, computer) into a material with a “professional finish” without too much effort on the part of the user. Not too many lay-out options are available in Projeqt, though.

Presentation materials are great ways to spice up the marketing pitch of newbie entrepreneurs. A simple reminder though: These are just tools to help startup entrepreneurs. In the end, the entrepreneurs’ ability to market their products and services still counts the most. But this would not be possible without the help of the best presentation apps, of course.

Payman Taei is a designer and founder of HindSite Interactive an award-winning Web design and Web development company. His passion for democratizing design has led him to develop Visme a do-it-yourself platform allowing non designers to translate boring data into engaging presentations and infographics.